Improvements in roadway and automobile designs have steadily reduced injury and death rates in developed countries. Nevertheless, auto collisions are still the leading cause of injury-related deaths, an estimated total of 1.2 million worldwide in 2004, or 25% of the total from all causes. Further, driving safety is particularly important for higher-risk drivers such as teens and elderly drivers, as well as higher-risk passengers such as infant and elderly passengers. For example, motor vehicle crashes are the number one cause of death for American teens.
Thus, driving safety remains a critical issue in today's society. Various efforts and programs have been initiated to improve driving safety over the years. For example, driving instruction courses (often referred to as “drivers ed”) are intended to teach new drivers not only how to drive, but how to drive safely. Typically, an instructor rides as a passenger and provides instruction to the learning driver, and evaluates the driver's performance. As another example, “defensive driving” courses aim to reduce the driving risks by anticipating dangerous situations, despite adverse conditions or the mistakes of others. This can be achieved through adherence to a variety of general rules, as well as the practice of specific driving techniques. Defensive driving course provide a variety of benefits. For example, in many states, a defensive driving course can be taken as a way to dismiss traffic tickets, or to qualify the driver for a discount on car insurance premiums.
From the perspective of an automobile insurance provider, the provider seeks to assess the risk level associated with a driver and price an insurance policy to protect against that risk. The process of determining the proper cost of an insurance policy, based on the assessed risk level, is often referred to as “rating.” The rating process may include a number of input variables, including experience data for the specific driver, experience data for a class of drivers, capital investment predictions, profit margin targets, and a wide variety of other data useful for predicting the occurrence of accidents as well as the amount of damage likely to result from such accidents.
In the industry today, driving behavior data for insurance rating purposes is collected by specialized devices that plug into vehicle data ports. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,832,141, issued to Skeen et al., discloses an onboard diagnostic memory module that is configured to plug into the OBD II port. The memory module is preprogrammed with data collection parameters through microprocessor firmware by connection to a PC having programming software for the module firmware. Data is recorded on a trip basis. Intelligent interrogation occurs by interpretive software from an interrogating PC to retrieve a trip-based and organized data set including hard and extreme acceleration and deceleration, velocity (in discrete bands), distance traveled, as well as the required SAE-mandated operating parameters.